Tuesday, January 02, 2007

Page Proofs

It is only January 2, but it has already been a fun year, professionally speaking. A few months ago, I mentioned an article that I have been working on for a couple of years now, and how patience is the guiding word when trying to shepherd a manuscript through the review and publication process. Well, today was a cool milestone in that process. The publisher (Blackwell) sent me the page proofs for the article, which will be appearing in the inaugural issue of a journal called Regulation & Governance.

Page proofs are neat in that it is the first time you get to see your article in the format in which it will appear when published. Prior to this point, the manuscript had been living on my computer and USB drive as a boring old Word document.

One thing that is distinctive about the page proofs for this article (I would post them, but am prohibited from doing so, according to the Exclusive License Form that I signed a couple of months back) is that there are 22 queries that came up during the process of converting the manuscript to the journal's format. It is now up to me to answer these queries, most of which have to do with clarifying bibliographic information (e.g., provide the date, month, and year for a bunch of works that are cited in the paper).

No big deal, but one more example of patience...every time I think I am done with this article, there seems to be yet another task that has to be completed before the research will finally see the light of day. Stay tuned...